Art in Contemporary Anglo-American Fiction: The Ekphrastic Novel
By Sofie Behluli
Oxford UP, 2025
ISBN: 9780198954484
This book addresses the recent surge of Anglo-American novels about visual art since the 2010s and interprets it as a coming of age of an old literary sub-genre, which is here termed as the 'ekphrastic novel'. These novels are distinguished by their systematic use of ekphrasis which creatively and critically negotiates the intertwined aesthetics of literature and visual art. By addressing the challenge of representing visual images such as photographs, paintings, and art installations with words, these novels reveal a greater interest in exploring how and why we engage with art, rather than merely depicting the art itself. In this way, ekphrastic novels present themselves as powerful practitioners and critics of contemporary image-making.
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The book focuses on four aspects emerging from ekphrastic passages--value, form, affect, and scale--to explore critical questions posed by contemporary ekphrastic novels: Who has the power to assign value today, and at what cost? Which social, political, historical, cultural, and ethical dimensions are obscured by certain forms, and how can ekphrasis (re)introduce these aspects into public discourse? What affects do images and artworks elicit, and how do they reinforce or challenge existing value systems? How can narrative scale uncover potential injustices in the interplay between life and art? Moreover, what insights do ekphrastic novels offer into contemporary reading habits and strategies? By tracing a literary tradition from nineteenth-century to contemporary fiction and offering detailed close readings of several critically acclaimed and widely read contemporary novels, this book delves into the theoretical and practical intersections of ekphrasis and the novel.
- Explores the intersection of ekphrasis and the novel and introduces a new sub-genre: the 'ekphrastic novel'
- Shows how indebted contemporary novels on art are to their nineteenth-century literary predecessors
- Provides detailed close readings of several critically acclaimed and widely read contemporary novels
Sofie Behluli is an advanced postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, where she teaches and conducts research on "Dis/affection in 19th-Century American Literature." Prior to holding this post, she completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford. Behluli is interested in intermediality and ekphrasis studies, affect theory, life writing, gender studies and feminist literature, and theoretical conceptions of the contemporary. Her work has been published in Women: A Cultural Review (2021), Anglia: Journal of English Philology (2022), and Contemporary Literary Criticism (2023), as well as in several companions and handbooks.
